Halloween Short: Suburban Witch DIY
I haven't been posting much this week- but here's a fun little story I wrote a few years back about a witch to tide y'all over.
Happy Halloween!! 🎃
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The monthly coven gathering was going to start in less than an hour and Maurli was just taking care of the finishing touches. The fish legs and frog tails had been taken out of the freezer to thaw, the bags of commercial brand coal had been hauled from her baby blue sedan into the gathering space in her basement, and totems of protection had been carefully placed on every windowsill and hung in every doorway. All that was left were the decorations.
Since it was the spring equinox gathering, Maurli wanted her home to be blooming with plant life. Over the past two weeks she had been administering a growth potion to all of her houseplants and even used it to cultivate new plants from seeds. Now her house was stuffed with more greenery than the garden section of a home depot: Sage, rosemary, and thyme crowded the hanging pots of her kitchen, her Livingroom was a jungle of bamboo and money trees, and the bathrooms were made delightfully aromatic with flowering vines and budding stalks. Every corner, every table, and every wall was overflowing with life. For most witches this would be enough, but after the Yule party last winter, Maurli knew she needed to step it up.
Yiressa had been the host for Yule and had used an unmelting glittering snow spell on the ceilings in her home, creating a stunning winter wonderland. The spell itself wasn’t that difficult, but that uppity broom-licker Yiressa hasn’t let anyone forget how good her party looked and was constantly asking Maurli how she was going to top it.
Well Maurli had found an article in one of last months issues of Bewitched Weekly and had turned her abode into a greenhouse to maximize the wow factor of the spell. The article was “DIY Glowing Houseplants” and when her guests came into her house, Maurli planned on shutting off all the electricity, and lighting her house with the soft glowing of the hundreds of plants strategically placed around the suburban home.
Maurli bustled into the kitchen, pulling the magazine clipping out from the spell book she shoved it into. She had everything she needed: beard of gnome, 2 teaspoons birchbark, a pinch of arrowroot, and 20 grams of overpriced dryad clippings she found at the Charmers Market. She mixed all the ingredients into a fine dust using her bullet blender before sifting the dust into a stone bowl. Maurli turned off all the lights before tossing a match into the mixture. A green glowing flame rose up within the bowl and Maurli chanted the spell, peering at the recipe on her counter.
“Paak'alo'ob Paak'alo'ob
Iluminan a kuxtal yéetel guían in beel
Brillar yéetel u páajtalil a concede a el
Igual u le k'áak'o’ brilla tin k'abo'ob!”
As she chanted, the fire burst out of the bowl into hundreds of small glowing orbs, flying to the plants spread about the house and melting into their leafy auras. When all the orbs found a host, the foliage began glowing, and Maurli knew she had made a mistake.
Every plant, from the lilies on the fireplace, to the ivy snaking through the halls, was not only glowing, they were FLASHING. Not a slow soft flashing either, but a bright strobing that assaulted Maurli’s eyes. Maurli dropped the stone bowl and put a hand up to shield her vision, her other hand snatching up her DIY instructions. Maybe the dryad clippings were actually ent clippings? she wondered in a panic. That son of a witch at the charmers market might have screwed her over. Maurli read through the article several times, trying to find any reason for the spell to have gone wrong.
“Merlin’s ass, it called for 2 tablespoons of birch bark, not 2 teaspoons” Maurli muttered bitterly, glaring at the failure around her. She wanted her decorations to be the talk of the coven, and with the way her house was lighting up like a will o’ wisp on basilisk juice, Maurli was sure it would be.
“Craaaa Craaaaa” came the squawking of the doorbell, interrupting Maurli’s brooding. Her coven sisters have arrived, and her house was as charming as the broken turn signal on Syv’s broom. There was no way Maurli was ever going to live this down, she needed to find a potion to fix this, fast.
She ripped through her pantry, her doorbell croaking urgently all the while. “Just a moment!” she shouted cheerily, clawing her way through boxes of wormwood crunch cereal and mason jars filled with sleep warding potions. After picking through the many bottles on the back shelf she came upon the one thing that may save her reputation with the Coven, a potion that can dilute the senses and lower expectations.
Quickly flipping through her phone, she selected a playlist with heavy bass and pumped it through her home speakers before she strode to the door with confidence, carrying a basket full of Vodka as the plants flashed in time with the music.
This was going to be a spring equinox to remember.
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A lot of other blogs on here have fun Halloween stories, idk if they'll post them to their blog directly but in case they do go check out @marlowethelibrarian @dragoninatrenchcoat @rotting-moon-writes @words-after-midnight @cowboybrunch
@gioiaalbanoart @saturnine-saturneight @leahnardo-da-veggie and @wyked-ao3 (I wrote one for this year but uhh.. couldn't figure it out. So I cheated.)
